So, for the last 12 years or so I’ve been working with another Looking Glass, um, alum, Mark LeBlanc, on this, uh, MDA workshop that we teach at GDC every year. And I teach it, um, I’m actually going to go down and see Daniel teach in Argentina pretty soon. Um, MDA is the fundamental underpinning of my philosophy now, Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics. And the idea is that you can think of a game design by thinking about the mechanics. And a lot of game designers like to think about the mechanics. We’ll have dice. And there will be monsters. And then you’ll go through these rooms and you’ll think about like can you get this monster, or maybe you have to retreat. And thinking about those individual systems and interactions is one of the things that designers do best. It gives us a lot of brain chemistry reward to think about complicated systems. However, um, the player’s experience is often on the other end, through the dynamics of the game, which is when they interact with the game. They get an aesthetic experience, an outcome, an emotional feeling from the game itself. And the aesthetic goal of a game, if you think about the game from the aesthetics first, you can design backwards to the correct mechanics as opposed to putting a bunch of mechanics in a box, shaking it up, and seeing what emotional experience you have on the other side. I prefer to design backwards from the aesthetics to the mechanics. So, on a game like Journey for example, uh, Genova, and Matt and Nick and the whole team, we spent a lot of time asking ourselves will these mechanics fundamentally support the feeling of awe and wonder towards the unknown. Will they fundamentally support the feeling of being alone together in a place that’s greater than you? Those were some of the aesthetic goals we had. And if you look at the concept art, and even through every iteration of the game you’ll see us working towards the aesthetic. Um, it helped us cut away mechanics that didn’t make sense.
